Serenity

I'm still in Brazil, but here in the internet café it occurs to me that I should start planning Serenity opening night now. I'm getting a posse together to see it open at the Metronomicon on Friday night, the 30th. Leave a comment if you're a browncoat who wants in; I work near the theater, so I'll score us all tix.

Today's quote

From Charles Gatewood, when asked "What's the weirdest place you've ever been?"

San Francisco

This is someone who has been some very weird places. His site is definitely not work-safe.

Radio silence

Yes, I know that it's been ages since I've been blogging lately. I'm embarassed. I have long overdue posts I want to get to about forgotten TV shows, cultural appropriation and racism, national service obligation, vigorous urging for you to see Serenity opening weekend, and of course the many failures of the Bush administration, so I will get back to it eventually.

But not immediately. I'm going on the road again, for a little over a week, off to Brazil. I'll be living a phone- and computer-free existence. So if you can't reach me, it's because you can't reach me.

Unhappy anniversary

Four years since 11 September 2001.

Time again to read what Phil Agre said four days later.

The people who conducted those terrorist attacks are entirely responsible for what they did. They are evil, and they made themselves evil by choice. Nearly as evil are the religious authorities who provided the ideological basis of this terrible self-making with their spurious justifications for suicide bombings. Yet the call to war is precisely a call for us, formerly citizens of a democracy, to remake ourselves in the image of that evil -- to ignore all evil deeds of our own, and instead to project all of our own failings into an enemy who grows ever bigger, ever more inhuman, with every exaggeration of the extent of the danger and the need for revenge. The call to war is not legitimate: it is not capable of delivering what it claims to deliver.

I've posted before about Mr. Agre, using the words "scary and prescient." At this point, though, I'm realizing that things are worse than he forsaw, in many important ways.

First things first

Having returned from Burning Man, before I say anything else, for those who haven't given yet, let me offer you Billmon's list of places to donate to relief efforts for New Orleans.